Treatment as (re-)Habituation: From Psychopathology to (re-)Actualised Subjectivity

2018 ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Finite Subjectivity

Chapter eight outlines how Hegel’s analysis seeks to overcome the problem of nature entailed by his conception of mental illness. It offers, therefore, a reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis of the category of habit. The chapter outlines the duplicitous signification of habit. First, habit expresses spirit’s liberating activity. It binds, unifies, the body’s manifold of instincts and drives as a singular whole. Second, spirit’s reconstructive activity takes the shape of a natural effect. The chapter argues that Hegel’s concept of habit shows itself as crucial to the problem of psychopathology and therefore nature: it combines the multitude of natural drives etc. within the unified simplicity of a subjective totality. Habit, therefore, is the grounding process that allows for the stabilized (re-)emergence of the subject out of its over-immersion in natural determinations. A close reading of habit, however, reveals that there is nothing that guarantees the problem of nature has been permanently ‘sublated.’ To the contrary, the chapter contends that what Hegel’s analysis shows is how closely bound the problem of nature is to his conception of finite subjectivity and freedom. Taking this to be the case allows for this question: how does nature factor in objective spirit, i.e. the political register?

The Nightmare of Reason and Regression into the Night of the World

2018 ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Significant Problem ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Radical Freedom ◽  
Finite Subjectivity

This chapter critically reads finite subjectivity in terms of its natural, instinctual dimension. The chapter’s objective is to further substantiate the significant problem Hegel’s conception of nature poses to his project of radical freedom. Developing a sense of subjectivity’s potential for “regression”, the chapter seeks to outline how, as in the case of acute psychopathology, subjectivity’s ordering of its instinctual dimension might be undermined. Hegelian regression, therefore, is a haywire inversion where the logical superiority of spirit’s freedom is subordinated to the ontologically prior register of instinct. Extrapolating from this analysis, the chapter contends that the unconscious-instinctual depth of the subject is never entirely abandoned; this abyss (Schacht) of indeterminacy lingers within the matrices of finite spirit and has the perpetual possibility of breaking-loose to the detriment of subjectivity’s free self-actualizing activity. Consequently, a reconstruction of Hegel’s account of mental illness forcefully demonstrates how nature remains a perpetual source of trauma for finite subjectivity and, therefore, the life of spirit.

Alain Badiou’s Mallarmé: From the Structural Dialectic to the Poetry of the Event

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Boncardo
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

This third chapter tracks Alain Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé, beginning with his extensive treatment of the poet in his first and most politically-committed work, Theory of the Subject, where Mallarmé figures as a liminal figure: an ingenious political conservative whose insights need to be integrated yet surpassed by Badiou, the political radical. The chapter then turns to Badiou’s post-Being and Event work and offers a close reading of the latter book’s treatment of Mallarmé before investigating Mallarmé’s political significance for Badiou in this second stage of his philosophical career. Through a reading of Badiou’s polemic with Czeslaw Milosz in Handbook of Inaesthetics, the chapter argues that Mallarmé becomes an unequivocal comrade for Badiou in his post-Being and Event period: a resolute egalitarian who points the way towards the advent of a generic humanity.

Prescriptive Power: Biologism, Biopsychiatry and Drug-centred Psychopharmacology

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Francis Russell
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biological Ontology ◽  
Health Discourse

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.

Reading Politics with Machiavelli

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Family Farm ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
White Nationalism ◽  
The Republic

Reading Politics with Machiavelli is an anachronistic reading of certain key concepts in Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses (as well as some of his correspondence). In 1513, soon after the Medici returned to power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his position as First Secretary to the Republic, and he was exiled. On his family farm, he began a self-consciously anachronistic reading of great political figures of antiquity, and, in combination with his own experience as a diplomat, crafted a unique perspective on the political crises of his time. At our own moment of democratic crisis, as the democratic imagination, as well as democratic habits and institutions face multiple attacks from neoliberalism, white nationalism, and authoritarianism, I argue that a similar method, in which we read Machiavelli’s work as he read Livy’s and Plutarch’s, can help us see the contingency, and the increasingly forgotten radical potential, of our politics. Louis Althusser argued that Machiavelli functions for us as an uncanny authority, one whose apparent familiarity is dispelled as we examine his epistolary yet opaque account of history, politics, and authority. This makes his readings a potentially rich resource for a time of democratic crisis. With that challenge in mind, we will examine the problems of conspiracy, prophecy, torture, and exile and use a close reading of Machiavelli’s work to make out new perspectives on the politics of our time.

Politonomy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
State Theory ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
The Political ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scientific Significance

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s contribution to political jurisprudence. It approaches the issue through the concept of politonomy, a concept first alluded to by Schmitt but which he never developed. Politonomy seeks a scientific understanding of the basic laws and practices of the political. The chapter situates Schmitt within the German tradition of state theory and shows that his overall objective was to build a theory of the constitution of political authority from the most basic elements of the subject. It suggests that Schmitt occupies an ambivalent position in political jurisprudence and that this is because of his distrust of the scientific significance of general concepts. To the extent that he acknowledged the existence of a ‘law of the political’, this is found in Schmitt’s embrace of institutionalism in the 1930s and later in his account of nomos as the basic law of appropriation, division, and production.

Democracy and Political Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross McKibbin
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social System ◽  
Political System ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.

Coleridge's “ideal Realism”: an alternative to the “doctors of the Absolute”?

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
First Time

A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character. Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.

Madness, virtue, and ecology: A classical Indian approach to psychiatric disturbance

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512098224
Author(s):  
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Psychiatric Disturbance ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Relationship

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

The Israeli–Lebanese war of 2006: consequences for Lebanon

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-210
Author(s):  
Ziad Hafez
Keyword(s):  
Arab Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Major Consequence ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Defence Policy ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact

This article focuses on the political narrative in Lebanon before and after the Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006. It revolves around the subject of national unity as a sine qua non condition for success for the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah. A major consequence of the narrative on national unity is the need to build a modern state and establish a cohesive defence policy. The paper also examines the impact of the war on Lebanon's economy and on its relations with the rest of the world (the USA, France, Syria, Arab countries, and Iran).

The Cycle of Agathias: New Identifications Scrutinised

1969 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 87-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. McCail
Keyword(s):  
Recent Article ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Dead Man ◽  
Published Account

The Cycle of sixth-century epigrams edited by Agathias Scholasticus is the subject of a recent article by Mr and Mrs A. Cameron (JHS lxxxvi [1966] 6 ff.), who argue cogently that it was published in the early years of Justin II, and not the later years of Justinian, as has hitherto been supposed. Ca. also suggest identifications for many of the poets and imperial officials who figure in the Cycle. They do not, however, exhaust all the identifications that can be made, and some of those suggested by them require amplification or correction. Furthermore, Ca.'s view of the dating of the Cycle leads them, it seems to me, to underestimate its Justinianic character. The following observations are offered without prejudice to the merit of Ca.'s article as a whole.Among the Cyclic poets, only Julian the ex-Prefect of the East stands in close relationship to the political life of the age. His involvement in the Nika insurrection of 532 is attested by historical sources and, as Ca. claim (13), by two epigrams of the Anthology. The latter, however, contain difficulties passed over by Ca. In the first place, of the two epigrams on the cenotaph of Hypatius, only AP vii 591 is certainly from Julian's pen; vii 592 is unattributed in the Palatine MS., a fact which Ca. omit to mention. (It is absent from the Planudean MS.) The state of affairs in P is no accident, vii 591, though eulogising the dead man and alluding openly to the casting of his corpse into the sea, is moderate in tone, and would have caused no more offence to Justinian than Procopius's published account of the affair.

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